Click here for my movie site

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

New Zealand trip diary - day 2

We both spent a few hours awake during the night, but then
slept again, waking up permanently around 7.30 am. If we’re lucky, that’s all
it’ll take to adjust to the new time zone (currently eighteen hours different,
including local daylight savings time). Via the Urban Dog webcam I was able to
see Ozu for the first time in some forty-four hours – he was sticking with the
big dogs (often/usually he gets dominated and has to be relocated with the
little dogs) and looking good. And of course by now I have a big backlog of
website reading, although it hardly matters as much when we're on a trip (I wish I could
more easily convince myself it doesn’t matter at home either – I’d save so much
time, and be at least a little happier, if I never clicked on another story
about US politics). The hotel wi-fi is pretty good, although it delivers a high
percentage of failed “This page cannot be displayed” first serves; it's usually all
fine on the second serve.

We had breakfast in the hotel and at 10.30 caught a ferry to
Rangitoto island, about twenty minutes away. The island, per the literature, “erupted
from the sea in a series of dramatic explosions around 600 years ago.” The
crater's covered now in dense vegetation, but other parts of the island still
have a desolate, barely-cooled look to them. We walked up to the summit,
which took about an hour, and then took a trail to explore some lava caves
(according to a woman we met around there, we missed the most impressive of the
lava caves, but having overlooked the advice on the pamphlet to “take a torch!”
we probably couldn’t have enjoyed it anyway). We then walked to the western
end of the island, where there’s a little beach and a view of a lighthouse; we
sat there and had lunch, and then walked back along the coast to the starting point. This
took about four hours, all under a gorgeous blue sky; it was a high of nineteen
I think (but often with a pleasant breeze). The last ferry leaves at 3.30 pm; I’m
not sure what happens if you miss it (starting on December 26th, for
one month only, there’s another ferry that leaves at 5 pm, so I guess that’s the
peak period). Near the wharf you find a few tiny houses; apparently there was
a small community living there in the early 20th century. I’m not
sure if they’re ever occupied now, although they look like they might sometimes
be (the telltale clue of a TV antenna on one of them for instance). The
guardians of the island seem very concerned about keeping “pests” at bay, and
at one point in the walk we encountered a little black spaniel wearing a “conservation
dog” vest. As we were leaving we saw there were actually three conservation
dogs, but from the little we observed them they seemed more interested in getting
petted than in rigorous conservation work.

Between the island and the ferry journey we got many fine
views of Auckland’s winding coastline today. In some cities, you feel the
downtown core exerting a magnetic pull on everything else, but Auckland feels like
the opposite, as if it would be easy to settle into your own little patch of beauty and then not worry about the collective shape of it all (this is just my
fanciful impression of course – in fact it has the same escalating congestion
problems as everywhere else; they're discussing building an
underwater tunnel to replace or supplement the main commuter bridge). This was
pretty much the emblematic vacation day for us – find some quiet corner of the
world that we’d never have thought about unless we were here, and then walk
ourselves into the ground (one could also go most of the way up the volcano on
a tractor-pulled “road-train,” but it was heartening to see that of the several
dozen people on the island today, only about six chose that lazy option). When we
walked back to the hotel from the ferry terminal, we felt as settled in as if
we’d been here for days. It doesn’t take long to start establishing little
routines – for example, we stopped at the same snack bar twice today. But
then, as we already noted, settling into New Zealand isn’t much of a challenge,
if you’re from Canada. Just based on the look of the streets, the population isn't as
diverse as we have at home, although having said that, almost
everyone we’ve transacted with so far – the various people in the hotel, the
restaurant last night, in that snack bar, the cab driver from the airport, the ticket sellers in the
ferry terminal – seems to be an immigrant of one
kind or another.

In many or most cities, of course, you have your glamorous
high-end stores on certain streets and malls, and your local no-name stores on
others, but from what we’ve seen so far, in Auckland they most often all seem to be mixed
together, so Prada might rub shoulders with some old timers getting by on
selling pencils (I just made that up – it’s not an actual example), giving it an "all in this together" kind of feeling. Based on
initial impressions, it’s a bit more expensive here, but part of that’s
probably inevitable given the smaller population and the relative isolation. The wine at least doesn't seem to cost any more – I guess they
have a lot of that. I think this is the first hotel room we’ve been in for a
long while that didn’t have either CNN or BBC World on the menu, so maybe they don’t expect guests to care
about world news. As noted earlier, I think there'd be some merit to that.

Anyway, Ally slept for a while when we got back, but I never
did, and this is actually a breakthrough given my recent addiction to having a
daytime nap. We wandered round a bit afterwards but ended up eating within a
block of the hotel again, in a place called The Wine Chambers – Ally had
risotto and I had more asparagus than I’ve ever seen on one plate, along with
some other things. We shut that place down actually, but compared to last
night, it seemed there was plenty of action going on elsewhere, none of it
destined for us.